I
It appears that advances in medical science have transformed our relation to death. We have become so good at postponing death that it seems to be less than ever a natural process. Life support systems can keep the patient alive even after the brain has died. But what is a "natural" death? There was a time when what counted as a "natural" death was a death that had been anticipated, so that there was opportunity for the bedroom scene, in which death was welcomed along with the visitors who came to say farewell to the dying person.1 What counts as the old attitude to death and what as the new? Is euthanasia a new problem forcing doctors to rethink their task as doctors? Or is it tied to the old tradition of voluntary suicide that has merely been interrupted by Christian taboos? Is death always an enemy? Or is that only the perspective of the survivors, who because of the loss they have suffered cannot see death as anything but a thief in the night? Death has sometimes seemed to be an absolute negation of life, but the new ethical problems that have arisen in health care show us doctors who are unable to provide a secure definition of death to enable them to decide the moment of death, as if there was only a thin line between life and death.
Such considerations seem to highlight the need to recall the history of attitudes to death before embarking on a philosophical investigation of death, if only to help us to get our bearings. What is one to make of the fact that Martin Heidegger, the twentieth century philosopher who more than anyone made death once more a central theme of philosophy, proceeded by excluding at the outset an historical approach from his ontological interpretation into death? Even though his reopening of the ontological question was supposed to be accompanied by a destruction of the history of ontology, he deliberately tried to set up an historical and cultural vacuum in order to establish the proper context for posing the question of death.
First of all, in section 47 of Being and Time, Heidegger ruled out using the death of others as the basis for the interpretation. Funeral rites, internment and the cult of graves tell us more about the way those who are left behind mourn their loss than they tell us about death itself.2 It is within the context of his rejection of the suggestion that the dying of Others could serve as a substitute theme for an existential analysis, that Heidegger made the claim to which I shall return later that "no one can take the Other's dying away from him" (SZ 240). Heidegger wrote: "Of course someone can 'go to his death for another'. But that always means to sacrifice oneself for the Other 'in some definite affair'" (SZ 240). The dying of Others cannot serve as "a substitute theme" for the analysis of Dasein because one cannot substitute for the Other in death (SZ 238). Heidegger conceded that one can "go to one's death for another" on some specific occasion, but he emphasized that the other would still have to die some time: "By its very essence, death is in each case mine, in so far as it `is' at all" (SZ 240). The positive conclusion Heidegger drew from this was that any ontological investigation of death could only have the form of an existential analysis, that is to say, one in which the Being of the entity to be analyzed is mine.
Subsequently Heidegger attempted to differentiate the ontological investigation of death from what could be learned from other disciplines. In section 49 Heidegger acknowledged the possibility of a biological investigation in which, for example, one examined the causes of death. Such an investigation would operate with provisional conceptions of life and death. The question was whether it would be able to contribute at some later stage to the existential-ontological investigation. Heidegger commented:
Medical and biological investigations into 'demising' can obtain results which may even become significant ontologically if the basic orientation for an existential Interpretation of death has been made secure. Or must sickness and death in general - even from a medical point of view - be primarily conceived as existential phenomena? (SZ 247)
The question that follows this strict ordering of the existential and the medical or biological investigation does not disturb the priority of the existential interpretation over medical and biological studies. Instead, the question reads like a marginal note or an afterthought that Heidegger addressed to himself so as to remind him to explore the possibility that once the existential interpretation had been completed, medicine and biology might have been transformed. Meanwhile Heidegger proceeded to extend the impact of the existential interpretation of death across a number of other disciplines. It serves as the foundation not just of any biology of life, but also of any biographical, historiological, ethnological or psychological investigation of death.
I shall offer two examples of the consequences of Heidegger's procedure. The first example alludes to a conclusion already arrived at in section 11 of Being and Time where it was argued that focusing on primitive Dasein might prove misleading, not because primitive Dasein was not a revealing resource, but because our knowledge of it involved the mediation of ethnology with its inadequate conception of Dasein (SZ 51-52). Hence Heidegger judged that "the ways in which death is taken among primitive peoples, and their ways of comporting themselves towards it in magic and cult, illuminate primarily the understanding of Dasein; but any Interpretation of this understanding already requires an existential analytic and a corresponding conception of death" (SZ 247). The second example draws on Heidegger's restriction of the discussion of death to the "this-worldly" and more immediately shows the difficulties into which Heidegger's procedure led him. An ontological examination is purely formal, leaving open the various ontical possibilities such as whether there is anything "after death" (SZ 247).
Nor is anything decided ontically about the 'other-worldly' and its possibility, any more than about the 'this-worldly'; it is not as if norms and rules are for comporting oneself towards death were to be proposed for 'edification.' But our analysis remains purely 'this-worldly' in so far as it Interprets that phenomenon merely in the way in which it enters into any particular Dasein as a possibility of its Being. (SZ 248)
The question is whether by confining the analysis of death to the 'this-worldly,' Heidegger had not implicitly made a decision against the 'other-worldly' and truncated the phenomenon at issue.3 Heidegger suggested that the decision had at most been postponed and that it was only when death had been conceived in its full ontological essence that one could be justified in asking what may be after death (SZ 248). This exemplifies the classic Heideggerian gesture of postponing certain ontic questions.
Ernst Cassirer, in notes written in 1928 for a projected continuation of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, recognized this application of the distinction between the ontological and the ontic as a major point of separation between his own thought and Heidegger's:
The ontological cannot be separated from the ontic nor the individual from the "general" in the way that Heidegger tries to - rather, the one is only from within the other. We understand the general not as the mere they, but as "objective spirit and objective culture." For Heidegger, thought has no access to such objectivity.4
It is worth bearing in mind that just as Cassirer responded in this way to Heidegger's attempt to separate the ontological from the ontic, so Heidegger's decision to put primitive Dasein to one side was already in part a response to Cassirer.5 Both gestures illustrate Heidegger's distance from anything that might pass as a philosophy of culture.
Heidegger knew that he was taking a risk by insisting on proceeding by a series of exclusions. He conceded that, having postponed questions of "a biology, psychology, theodicy or theology of death," he had exposed "the peculiar formality and emptiness of any ontological characterization" (SZ 248). However, what emerged during the course of Heidegger's investigation was the more specific difficulty of completing the existential analysis of death by demonstrating at the existential level authentic Being-towards-death (SZ 260 and 266-267). Heidegger's chapter on being-towards-death culminates in a series of questions that threaten to bring down the whole edifice that Heidegger was constructing, by mandating the return of what had been so carefully excluded and thereby confirming that ultimately the distinction between the ontological and the ontic cannot be sustained.6
II
The problem of the integrity of Heidegger's analysis has recently been raised anew by Derrida who in Aporias addressed the question of the borders that delimit Heidegger's existential analysis of death in the context of a broader consideration of death as a border.7 Derrida reintroduced what Heidegger excluded by recalling, "there are cultures of death" (PF 318; A 24). Under that title Derrida initially reinstated the very things that Heidegger had put to one side at the outset of his discussion: funeral rites, representations of dying, ways of mourning and of burying and so on (PF 318; A 24). However, when Derrida passed from the culture of death to the history of death, he seemed to legitimate the possible exclusion of nonWestern cultures.
One can speak of a history of death, and, as you know it has been done, for the West at least. The fact that, to my knowledge, it has only been done in the West (even though a Westerner, Maurice Pinguet, devoted to the question a study that was both genealogical and sociological, in La Mort voluntaire au Japon), that is to say, the fact that it has only been done "here at home," here where we are, does not mean that there is no history of death elsewhere or that no one has written any - unless the idea of a history and of a history of death is itself a Western idea in a sense that will be clarified later. (PF 318; A 24)
Even though one cannot be altogether surprised by this train of thought that refers history to the West and confines it there, if only because it is so widespread in Western philosophy, it is puzzling that Derrida invoked what is now also a familiar challenge to it, only to postpone consideration of this decisive question, especially as it is not clear that the idea is adequately clarified later in the essay.
It is possible that Derrida's main concern at this point was to protect Westerners from a comparative approach to death. In any event Derrida showed a clear preference for a history of death in the West of the kind given by Philippe Ariès over the comparative anthropo-thanatology of Louis-Vincent Thomas. In an attempt to explain the motivation behind their research, Derrida denounced both authors for introducing extraneous or unjustified valuations into their respective accounts. Ariès had found himself unable to resist such a statement as "The prohibitions of death born in the United States and in Northwestern Europe during the twentieth century penetrated into France from then on."8 Derrida called this affirmation "massive and careless" (PF 330; A 57) but he was an even more severe critic of Thomas's "admiring nostalgia" for a way of "resolving" the problem of death found in Africa. It appears that Thomas believed that "To know death better is to put it back into its rightful place." 9 Derrida rejected this "foolish comparatist predication" (PF 330; A 58) that deplored the alleged "disappearance of death in the modern West" (PF 330; A 57), making fun of the suggestion that "death is no longer what it used to be" (PF 330; A 58), while not denying it either. One wonders, however, whether Thomas's fault was not in part also his failure to follow the geographical borders that are somehow to be even more strictly adhered to than temporal boundaries.
Derrida also judged Thomas more harshly than Ariès on another issue. Although Derrida introduced the culture of death to complicate Heidegger's exclusion of it, Derrida did not dismiss the distinction that separated Heidegger's analysis of death from both the historians of death, such as Ariès, and the comparative anthropo-thanatologists, such as Thomas. Only the fundamental ontologist pauses to ask what death is. By contrast, "the historian knows, thinks he knows, or grants to himself the unquestioned knowledge of what death is, of what being-dead means" (PF 318; A 25). But whereas Ariès is praised for respecting the limits of his role as an historian, Thomas is criticized for overstepping the borders or, more precisely, tripping over them. Thomas quoted Heidegger as saying "No sooner is the human being born than he is already old enough to die" (SZ 245). Thomas responded with a question: "Does this incontestable (metaphysical) truth, verified by all the givens of the biological sciences and attested to by demography, mean anything at the level of lived experience?"10 However, as Derrida pointed out, not only was this statement attributed to Heidegger clearly marked by him as a quotation from Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, it also failed to respect Heidegger's crucial attempt to situate his analysis prior to any metaphysical truth and biology (PF 319; A 27).
Even though Derrida accused Thomas of not respecting Heidegger's distinction between the ontic and the ontological, this is only a prelude to Derrida's attempt to displace that distinction through his deconstruction of Being and Time as scientific philosophy. Derrida at a certain point in Aporias called attention to the problems inherent in securing the philosophical status of Heidegger's account. The immediate context for doing so is the difficulty of sustaining the distinction between dying (Sterben) and perishing (Verenden), in part because of the rigorous distinction it assumes between humans and animals, but also because of the difficulty of securing attestation for the authentic possibility of Being-toward-death. Derrida stated that if the rigor of this distinction were compromised, "the entire project of the analysis of Dasein, in its essential conceptuality, would be, if not discredited, granted another status than the one generally attributed to it" (PF 321; A 31-32). He explained further: "Being and Time would belong neither to science, nor to philosophy, nor to poetics" (PF 321; A 32).
I am thus increasingly inclined to read ultimately this great, inexhaustible book in the following way: as an event that, at least in the final analysis, would no longer simply stem from ontological necessity or demonstration. (PF 321; A 32)
Although some people will no doubt find this statement to be a radical questioning of Being and Time, others will find it remarkable that Derrida is only "increasingly inclined" to read the book this way, when it has for some time been somewhat widespread among certain Heidegger scholars, particularly those who also read Derrida. In any event, the difficulty of sustaining the distinction between the existential ontological analysis and a cultural analysis is part of the same problem, as is the problem of excluding ideals of existence. However, Derrida in Aporias did not present the discourse of Being and Time as being forced to have recourse to metontology as the return of the repressed, that is to say, as an acknowledgment of the irreducibility of the existentiell.11 He proposed a kind of double reading whereby fundamental ontology and history are both separate and yet somehow contained by the other one.
In the final pages of Aporias Derrida described how Heidegger's analysis bears witness to the religions of the Book from which it demarcated itself: "neither the language nor the process of this analysis of death is possible without the Christian experience, indeed, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic experience of death to which the analysis testifies" (PF 338; A 80). That is to say, Heidegger's analysis of death "repeats all the essential motifs" of ontotheology, as in its references to falling, inauthenticity, care, guilt, anxiety and so on. Indeed, Derrida in The Gift of Death suggested that it is far from clear that Heidegger and Levinas did not have a Christian approach to death.12 Derrida did not do much to support this assertion, but in respect of Heidegger the evidence is available and it touches those very claims of Heidegger on which Levinas and Derrida focus. Heidegger's thesis that "no one can take the Other's dying away from him," a thesis that leads to an existential projection of an authentic being-towards-death that included its non-relational character whereby death is taken over by Dasein alone (SZ 263), is not only anticipated by Luther but possibly drawn from him. Luther's "Eight Wittenberg Sermons of 1522" began:
The summons of death come to us all, and no one can die for another. Every one must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone. We can shout into another's ears, but every one must himself be prepared for the time of death, for I will not be with you then, nor you with me.13
On the basis of Heidegger's affinity with Luther's Christian approach to death it is now easier to be persuaded by Derrida's reference to "an irreducibly double inclusion: the including and the included regularly exchange places in this strange topography of edges" (PF 338; A 80). He illustrated this by proposing that, on the one hand, one can have a history of death in the West such as that written by Ariès which relies on the "universal delimitation that the existential analysis of death and Being and Time is," whereas, on the other hand, Being and Time can be included within a history of death. On the one hand, "the existential analysis exceeds and therefore includes beforehand the work of the historian, not to mention the biologist, the psychologist, and the theologian of death" in the manner of being presupposed by their work which it conditions (PF 338; A 80). On the other hand, "one can also be tempted to read Being and Time as a small, late document, among many others within the huge archive where the memory of death in Christian Europe is being accumulated" (PF 338; A 80-81). The logic at work seems at first sight very familiar to Derrida's readers. Being and Time, which by its claim to universality seeks to exceed the history of the West, is reenclosed within that history to which it after all belongs.14 However, the exchange of places to which Derrida draws attention allows the relation to be turned upside down. Being and Time is one document within the written history of death in the West among many and yet it can also be said to transcend that history insofar as it establishes the conditions for the writing of that history. This explains why Derrida wants the historians of death to respect the limits of such an inquiry, neither engaging in philosophical speculation, nor attempting to ignore the cultural limits of their starting-point. Only in that way could the particularity of the histories of death be offset against the Heideggerian analysis which knows no limits to its universality, at least in principle (PF 328; A 52).
III
Heidegger's discussion of death in Being and Time plays a double role. The most prominent theme of the chapter arises from the fact that until death is somehow included, it seems that the whole of Dasein has not been introduced into the investigation. However, Heidegger was also concerned that the analysis had previously focused only on the everydayness of Dasein and that Dasein's authenticity had not been included in the investigation. Both themes are at work in these pages and are clearly not unrelated, but at the end of the chapter the first task, which can be called the ontological task, has made significant progress, whereas the second task, the existential constitution, is left, as Heidegger himself expressed it, hanging in mid-air (SZ 267).
Although many discussions of being-toward-death seem to ignore the function Heidegger assigned to the discussion of death in relation to the book as a whole, a charge that could at least on the surface be extended to Levinas's early criticisms of Heidegger on death, this is certainly not true of Levinas's 1975 lectures on death and time.15 In those lectures Levinas acknowledged that the structure of Heidegger's analysis was determined by its role within fundamental ontology. However, that did not lead him to withdraw his criticisms, which are based on Dasein's Jemeinigkeit. Levinas wrote, "In dying the ontological structure which is mineness, Jemeinigkeit, is revealed" (DMT 44). This is echoed by Derrida: "It is in being-towards-death that the self of Jemeinigkeit is constituted, comes into its own, that is, comes to realize its unsubstitutability. The identity of the oneself is given by death, by the being-towards-death that promises one to it" (DM 49; GD 45. Trans. modified).
Levinas did not deny my singularity which is, as Derrida properly emphasized, tied to responsibility (DM 46; GD 42), but Levinas did contest Heidegger's exclusion of the death of the other from the analysis. Heidegger made a great deal of what he called the ownmost character of death. It belonged to Heidegger's presentation of the existential-ontological structure of death, alongside its character as non-relational, not to be outstripped, certain and indefinite (SZ 263-266). It even led him to the claim that death as "the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein," that is to say, death as "the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there," amounts to Dasein dissolving all its relations to any other Daseins (SZ 250). This severing of relations was, however, not presented as a description of death but as a formal account of what it might mean to take up one's death in authentic being-toward-death in what could perhaps be described as a dissolution of one's being lost in the "they" of inauthenticity.
In Aporias Derrida largely confined Levinas to the background of his discussion. In The Gift of Death, he gave Levinas a more prominent role, although in the context of the treatment of death in the second chapter Levinas is still largely subordinated to Heidegger. Derrida seemed to suggest there that Levinas's main criticism of Heidegger arose from a classic misunderstanding of what the latter was doing. Derrida even indicated that Heidegger foresaw - "exposing itself to it but exempting itself in advance" (DM 46; GD 42) - Levinas's objection. In numerous asides throughout his works Levinas seemed to juxtapose sacrifice to Heideggerian being-toward-death, as if the latter could not take account of the former. In The Gift of Death Derrida showed that this is not the case (DM 46; GD 42). According to Heidegger, my death is a possibility that I can assume in authenticity. Although Heidegger had difficulty providing the existentiell attestation that his existential analysis called for, it would seem that sacrificing oneself for another might be one of the ways in which this happens. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that in the 1930s Heidegger from time to time promoted such a conception in the context of National Socialism.16 Thinking perhaps less of these references than of the inclusion in The Origin of the Work of Art of sacrifice as one of the ways in which truth happens,17 Derrida suggested that Heidegger's thinking as much as that of Levinas has "paid constant attention to the fundamental and founding possibility of sacrifice" (DM 46; GD 42). However, that is not the end of the matter. Levinas elsewhere emphasized the lack of an ethics of sacrifice18 and it is not clear that Heidegger had a good answer to why one would sacrifice oneself for another or for a cause, otherwise than to assume one's own death, and how that is possible is not exactly clear.
One question that Levinas never raised explicitly in so dramatic a form, but which nevertheless can be said to be implied by his criticism of Heidegger, is the question of whether my death is my own.19 According to Heidegger, "By its very essence death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all" (SZ 240). By contrast, death is in Levinas's thought other and approaches as an Other, like a murderer or a thief in the night. The closest Levinas came to addressing the question of the mineness of death directly was perhaps when he wrote: "It is for the death of the other that I am responsible to the point of including myself in that death" (DMT 54). Perhaps this is not altogether dissimilar from John Donne's "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."20 Levinas preferred to draw directly on the Bible. He cited the verse on Saul and Jonathan: "Loved and lovely in life, they were not separated in death, swifter than eagles, stronger than lions."21 Levinas quoted these lines in an article entitled "Mourir pour," an essay which he acknowledged that he had at one stage been tempted to call "Mourir ensemble" (EN 227). The biblical verses were cited as a response to Heidegger: "As if, contrary to the Heideggerian analysis, all relation to the Other is not dissolved in death" (EN 228). Nevertheless, although Levinas had elsewhere said that "death was not of the world" (DMT 130), as if, with Heidegger's 'this worldly' account in mind, Levinas's reflections were not 'other worldly,' Levinas specified that he did not think that the Biblical verse referred to "another life" after death.
By focusing on the death of the Other and by making it indispensable for any understanding of death, Levinas appeared to contest the very basis of Heidegger's account. He did so by giving the death of Others, including a culture's manner of burying and mourning the dead, renewed philosophical significance. However, there is more to it than that. It emerges that Levinas, by insisting on the death of the Other as a source not just of an understanding of death but also of my responsibility, radically altered the meaning of singularity. Levinas did not ignore my own death. It played an indispensable role in his analysis. But for him death was always a scandal (DMT 130) and my death in particular was an absurdity, at least insofar as it was death for nothing. However "this absurdity . . . makes possible the gratuitousness of my responsibility for the Other" (DMT 134). This then would be Levinas's answer to the question that Heidegger had no answer for, the question of why one would sacrifice one's own life for another and it emerges only once the exclusion of a possible cultural meaning to death independent of my own has been restored to the analysis. But, of course, Levinas would not accept this description of what he had accomplished.
I have not tried to answer the questions with which I began. Along the way Derrida, in taking on Ariès and Thomas, gave valuable instruction on certain gestures that are better avoided. But perhaps another more valuable lesson has been learned. In philosophy death is conventionally the place of the passage from universality to singularity. Perhaps it is not by accident that one continuously hears the refrain:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Levinas and Derrida have both made a connection between death and responsibility on the basis of the fact that both are the site of the conjunction of the singular and the universal. However, what usually tends to get omitted from Levinas's discussion of ethics is the importance of particularity in the sense of religion, race, nationhood, culture, gender and so on. Levinas tended to aim at respect for the singular qua human and nothing else, so that all of these other features of the discussion are treated as obstacles. But this means that the persecuted one is welcomed not in terms of what he or she has been persecuted for - as Jew, as African-American, as woman - but in his or her universality, which is not the welcome they seek.22 That is, in part, why I have focused on both Levinas's and Derrida's recognition of the irreducibility of culture in their discussions of death. Of course, Levinas did not thematize his debt to Judaism in his philosophical works until relatively late in his development. Up until then he had relied on a distinction between his philosophical and his confessional writings which in its application was somewhat disingenuous. It is revealing therefore that in a 1976 essay Levinas explicitly addressed Ernst Bloch's use of both Greek and Judaic sources on death with the aim of emphasizing the Jewish motifs in Bloch's discussion.23 The problem with Levinas's approach is that the only cultures he recognized as philosophical were European - the Bible and the Greeks - and they represented for him universality.24
The relation of death to culture is not the same for Levinas and for Derrida, but in contrast to Heidegger, who simply sought to exclude culture, or at least postpone its introduction, they both addressed the culture of death. In Levinas, culture appears both in the guise of the universal, as in his appeals to the Bible and to Greek philosophy, and for itself, as when we relate to the death of others in mourning. Derrida, by contrast, seems to have recognized the irreducible role of culture more explicitly, but it should not be forgotten that the context for his comments in Aporias was the complicating of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, not the question of ethics as such. In Levinas it was, by contrast, a question of the relation between ethics and ontology. For Levinas, that meant, as always, the relation between the Bible and Greece. If Levinas did not always say this explicitly, it was out of a certain respect for the autonomy of philosophical discourse. But, as we have seen, its autonomy is, strictly speaking, impossible.
1 Philippe Ariès, L'homme devant la mort, Paris: Seuil, 1977, pp. 109-112; trans. Helen Weaver, The Hour of Our Death, New York: Vintage, 1982, pp. 106-110. See also John McManners, Reflections at the Death Bed of Voltaire. The Art of Dying in Eighteenth-Century France, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 and Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
2 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967, p. 238; trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967, p. 284. Henceforth all references to the German edition as SZ.
3 See Michel Haar, Heidegger et l'essence de l'homme, Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990; pp. 29 and 39; trans. William McNeill, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 5 and 13.
4 Ernst Cassirer, Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen. Nachgelassene Manuskripte, vol. one, ed. John Michael Krois, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995, p. 220; trans. John Michael Krois, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 201-202.
5 See M. Heidegger, Review of E. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Former. 2. Teil: Das mythische Denken, in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe vol. 3, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991, pp. 255-270.
6 See for example, with respect to death, Robert Bernasconi, "Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heidegger's Footnote on Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'," Heidegger in Question, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993, pp. 76-98.
7Jacques Derrida, "Apories. Mourir - s'attendre aux `limites de la verité'," Le passage des frontières, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, Paris: Galilée, 1994, p. 319; trans. Thomas Dutoit, Aporias. Dying - awaiting one another at the `limits of truth', Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, p. 28. Henceforth PF and A respectively.
8 P. Ariès, Essais sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours, Paris: Seuil, 1975, p. 15. This passage is not found in the English translation, Western Attitudes toward Death, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1974.
9 Louis-Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort, Paris: Payot, 1976, p. 58. Without taking sides on this issue it should at least be acknowledged that Thomas has contributed greatly to European knowledge of African attitudes to death. See Louis-Vincent Thomas, La mort Africaine, Paris: Payot, 1982, and "Une coutume Africaine: L'interrogatoire du cadavre," in eds. L. V. Thomas, B. Rousset and Trinh van Thao, La mort aujourd'hui, Paris: éditions anthropos, 1977, pp. 229-249.
10 Louis-Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort, p. 223. The same question is attributed to Heidegger by Thomas in La mort en question. Traces de mort, mort des traces, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1991, pp. 311-312. It should be noted that in the latter book Thomas also makes sustained appeal to Levinas and Jankélévitch.
11 On metontology as Heidegger's own way of addressing the impossibility of separating the ontological from the ontic, see Robert Bernasconi, "The Double Concept of Philosophy," Heidegger in Question, pp. 25-39.
12 Jacques Derrida, "Donner la mort," L'éthique du don, eds. Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel, Paris: Transition, 1992, p. 51; trans. David Wills, The Gift of Death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 48. Henceforth DM and GD.
13 Martin Luther, "Acht Sermon gepridgt zu Wittenberg in der Fasten 1522," Luthers Werke in Auswahl, vol. 7, ed. Emanuel Hirsch, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962, p. 363; trans. John W. Doberstein, "Eight Sermons at Wittenberg, 1522," Luther's Works, vol. 51, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980, p. 70. Cassirer recognized the association with Heidegger. See Nachgelassene Manusckripte, vol. one, p. 364 n 462; trans. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, p. 203 n 37. For further associations between Heidegger's discussions of death and Luther, see Graham Parkes, "Rising Sun over Black Forest," Reinhard May, Heidegger's Hidden Sources, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 85 and 110n30, and John van Buren, "Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther," Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 171.
14 It should be emphasized that Derrida's way of formulating the question of the place of Being and Time within a history of death and of dying draws heavily on a conception of deconstruction that borrows from the later Heidegger and that is foreign to the conception of Destruktion proposed by Heidegger in Being and Time. See R. Bernasconi, "Seeing Double: Destruktion and Deconstruction," Dialogue and Deconstruction, eds. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 233-250. The proximity of Heidegger's analysis to the sermons of Luther figures differently when the task is a Destruktion of the tradition.
15 E. Levinas, Dieu, la Mort et le Temps, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993. Henceforth DMT.
16 See, for example, M. Heidegger, "Deutsche Studenten," Freiburger Studentenzeitung, VIII. Semester (XV), Nr. 1, 3. November 1933, p. 1. Quoted by Victor Farias, Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989, p. 176.
17 M. Heidegger, "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe vol. 5, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977, p. 49; trans. Albert Hofstadter, The Origin of the Work of Art, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, p. 62.
18 E. Levinas, "Mourir pour," Entre nous, Paris: Grasset, 1991, p. 229. Henceforth EN.
19 Blanchot, as so often, raised in a radical way the question to which Levinas led us but before which he hesitated, and yet, as so often, Blanchot took this thought elsewhere into the direction of the impersonal. In The Space of Literature Blanchot, in the context of a reading of Rilke, wrote the following prayer: "Grant me the death which is not mine, the death of no one, the dying which truly evolves from death, where I am not called upon to die, which is not an event - an event that would be proper to me, which would happen to me alone - but the unreality and the absence where nothing happens, where neither love nor meaning nor distress accompanies me, but the pure abandon of all that." Maurice Blanchot, L'espace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1978, pp. 195-196; trans. Ann Smock, The Space of Literature, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 149.
20 John Donne, Devotions XVII, Selections, ed. John Booty, New York: Paulist Press, 1990, p. 268.
21 Samuel II, 1, v. 23. Derrida would no doubt want to question Levinas's attempt to read the last two phrases as marking a distinction between the human and the animal.
22 See Robert Bernasconi, "The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances," Phenomenology of the Political, eds. Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000, pp. 169-187.
23 E. Levinas, "Sur la mort chez Ernst Bloch," De Dieu qui vient à l'idée, Paris: Vrin, 1986, pp. 65-66.
24 I have explored this issue in "Who is my neighbor? Who is the Other? Questioning 'the Generosity of Western Thought'," Ethics and Responsibility in the Phenomenological Tradition, Ninth Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1992, pp. 1-31.